I am returning from the national conference of the American
Association of Pastoral Counselors and do we have issues! I put a great deal
of energy into my role as a practitioner of psychotherapy or the healing of the
human spirit. I am someone who has hitched his wagon to a worthy horse and am
concerned when the horse’s hooves are not being cared for.
As I look around the conference, here in St. Louis, I see
several disquieting phenomena. First, most of the participants are either near
my age or beyond it. There are very few young people; even the “emerging
scholars” are mostly beyond thirty. When I tried to invite students from the GTU
seminaries in Berkeley (Those preparing to lead spiritual communities.) to the
Pacific Region conference in 2012 and 2013, I discovered that the only
remaining pastoral counseling program was at the Buddhist Institute. Not one of
the other nine entities has such a program.
My last national AAPC conference was in Phoenix. In the
denominational breakfast caucuses, I chose to join with the Quakers. I notice
that there is no officially stated Quaker breakfast here. Yet I have met two
Quakers and there may be more. Nor is there a Muslim, Buddhist or Jewish
breakfast. Now perhaps there are no Muslims, Buddhists or Jews—though I believe
I did see at least one kippa. Even if there are no members of those faith
communities here, the lack of preparation for them suggests a lack of either
awareness or of welcome.
Frankly, I see traditional religious groups (and not just Christian) diminishing in
our society and I worry that we do not adequately respond to the change. It is
not merely I who see this, but such research groups as MIT, Trinity College,
the Pew Research Council and more find the same thing. They also find an inverse
relationship between religion and education.
Of course, AAPC is attempting to
address this issue by the new emphasis on “spirituality.” I applaud this. I
read another research paper from MIT which showed that religious
non-affiliation rose from 8% to 18% between 1990 and 2010. Well over half of my
clients declare no religious affiliation, often looking to me to help them fill
their spiritual void.
Yesterday, I attended two different sessions about
“spirituality.” The first was a research project on spiritual approaches among
our membership. It was a very well done presentation of an ongoing
investigation with profound implications for psychotherapy, pastoral counseling
and AAPC.
But the second was something very fuzzy about the “divine
mind.” (There were no handouts, so I don’t have the exact wording.) It was very
troubling however, that a case study was presented where a woman had been in
treatment for nine years without significant change in her issues. (And this
followed a previous treatment of several years for the same thing.) The
presenter made the off-hand comment that other therapists had recommended “CBT”
as a treatment of choice, but the presenter simply dismissed this suggestion
out of hand. During the Q&A I asked why she had dismissed this suggestion.
The answer, “I don’t know CBT.” That statement was an admission of malpractice.
If CBT was a proper treatment (And it would have been almost classically so)
then the client should have been referred to someone else who did know CBT.
(CBT is a catch-all often used by people who don’t know and refers to a group
of over ten very different schools of therapy from DBT to REBT that have some
basic roots in the work of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. As a single form of
therapy, "CBT" does not exist. But its individual forms do.)
I mean no disrespect. I would guess that the
presenters are competent in their actual practice in most instances of working
with normal life issues. But the off-hand rejection of tools that have been
demonstrated—even in pastoral counseling (Think Howard Stone)—is a sad
statement. That is incompetence. Of course it would be so in any therapy community.
Now if our colleagues from other psychotherapy communities such
as the ACA, AMHCA, AAMFT were filling this spiritual space, I would be less concerned.
But I have sat in on "spirituality" workshops at their conferences and found them to be even
less competent. The one thing we, AAPC, bring to the table is that we have all
worked and studied our own spiritual path and have learned about the wide
variety of valuable spiritual lessons including the potential pitfalls on the
path. So we would better be about competence in spirituality than remaining an
arm of a conservative Christian cult.
I am proud of AAPC’s response to racism as evidenced by the
rainbow of colors in the plenary sessions. But I am fearful of the narrow
spectrum of participant faith communities, therapeutic tools—though I did hear
a few references to “attachment” and one to Bowlby—and our outreach to
potential new practitioners.
The integrated health care movement is a competitive one. It
will demand the best of what we can offer. At this point, it is difficult to
watch our response.
But perhaps it is just my narrow perspective.
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